Donna wrote:Which has always been the case with population movements through out history, they occur whether you like it or not and they occur whether or not host societies make life miserable or difficult for migrants.

It can always be halted, Donna. The political will simply isn't there. This needs to change.

Code Rood wrote:I don't think so. That's what the media wants you to believe. Just talk to some normal people and you'll quickly see that no one is really rooting for this type of stuff.

You may have to read between the lines when it comes to some people because we've been bombarded with guilt and political correctness so much, but it's plain to see how they really feel. They're just afraid to express it clearly.

People simply have no real choice in this current political climate. Political parties all think the same (more or less) on core issues like immigration.

Discussions with normal people about immigration are completely binary. You are either a xenophobe or a cosmopolitan and both positions are equally naive. It's very difficult to have any sort of nuanced discussions on this subject because people jump to reductionist arguments irrespective of what they think of the issue. The Alt-Right absolutely discredited any rational discussions about immigration. Meanwhile the media and chattering classes promote communalism of both left and right types. Mostly I encounter two types of opinions, it's either opposition to immigration on a xenophobic basis or it's accusations of racism for questioning the fundamentals of the current consensus.

Code Rood wrote:My solution to the aging population is to encourage people to have more babies and reward the mothers for it. I always get called racist or sexist when I say this, but in a normal world this would be applauded.

Developed countries in the global north, especially Western ones have become more and more individualistic and self-absorbed since 1965. I have encountered millenials who said they did not want children despite being able to do so. Is it any surprise that in such a climate people are not starting big families? My great grandfather had 14 children to two wives.

I would support your proposed measures but there would also have to be a massive cultural shift.

Political Interest wrote:I have encountered millenials who said they did not want children despite being able to do so.

We have to make it attractive and do-able for people to start a big family, but the elite simply doesn't want to do it. In fact, they're against family. They promote things that are anti-family. They're deliberately working against us.

I mean, have you taken a look at millennials lately? Truly a sad case. Many millennials are barely able to support their own. Many are riddled in debt. Many of us have been indoctrinated with absolute nonsense. I'm afraid that the damage may be irreversable for a lot of millennials. The boomers and Gen-X'ers are also damaged generations, so no surprise that it's going further downhill. So many things have indeed gone terribly wrong in the 60's. Maybe an intelligent silent or boomer can tell us more about it.

Political Interest wrote:there would also have to be a massive cultural shift.

Oh no doubt. And we can't wait for much longer either. The millennials have to make this shift happen. And that is a scary thought considering what state most millennials are in.

Political Interest wrote:Discussions with normal people about immigration are completely binary. You are either a xenophobe or a cosmopolitan and both positions are equally naive. It's very difficult to have any sort of nuanced discussions on this subject because people jump to reductionist arguments irrespective of what they think of the issue. The Alt-Right absolutely discredited any rational discussions about immigration. Meanwhile the media and chattering classes promote communalism of both left and right types. Mostly I encounter two types of opinions, it's either opposition to immigration on a xenophobic basis or it's accusations of racism for questioning the fundamentals of the current consensus.

I'd say anyone who wishes to reverse the very modernization of immigration (i.e. the Hart-Cellar shift) is qualitatively a white nationalist and a racist. Public discourse on immigration must begin with the rights and social well-being migrants and migrant communities (i.e. it should only be acceptable to restrict immigration in certain specific situations, such as a particular global pandemic or to prevent particular private firms from illegally exploiting migrant labour, such underpaying them or exposing them to unsafe working conditions). If someone wishes to turn immigration into a discourse on culture, they should at the very least be suspect of low key racism.

Developed countries in the global north, especially Western ones have become more and more individualistic and self-absorbed since 1965. I have encountered millenials who said they did not want children despite being able to do so. Is it any surprise that in such a climate people are not starting big families? My great grandfather had 14 children to two wives.

It has nothing to do with millennials being "self-absorbed". Increasingly people, especially increasingly politically conscious young women, are having legitimate ethical qualms about bringing human life into a world that is going off the rails and is effectively running on borrowed time.

Donna wrote:I'd say anyone who wishes to reverse the very modernization of immigration (i.e. the Hart-Cellar shift) is qualitatively a white nationalist and a racist. Public discourse on immigration must begin with the rights and social well-being migrants and migrant communities (i.e. it should only be acceptable to restrict immigration in certain specific situations, such as a particular global pandemic or to prevent particular private firms from illegally exploiting migrant labor, such underpaying them or exposing them to unsafe working conditions). If someone wishes to turn immigration into a discourse on culture, they should at the very least be suspect of low key racism.

It has nothing to do with millennials being "self-absorbed". Increasingly people, especially increasingly politically conscious young women, are having legitimate ethical qualms about bringing human life into a world that is going off the rails and is effectively running on borrowed time.

Donna I think immigration is an issue that is very much linked to capitalism and production. If capitalism had produced, safe, well paying and stable employment for the vast majority of the world? People don't leave the majority of their native nations. But it does not. It fails to produce decent paying and safe and stable employment for the majority of the nations of the world Even in the advanced ones like Germany, France, the USA, Italy, Spain, the UK, etc. So the system fails workers all over the world. Trying to argue that working-class people are somehow less cultured than the middle class of the world etc is just useless. People need to start looking at solutions and not blaming things on irrelevant details.

As for women and motherhood. Many women don't have stable marriages and reliable incomes that cover all the household expenses. Having kids with no real income is super difficult. Raising kids until they are 22 years old like one has to do nowadays is a long time drain on your income, time, and efforts. People don't tell you that having kids in a society like the USA is? With zero paid maternity leave that is guaranteed, the average cost of having a kid in a hospital is about $15-25,000 each. Lost wages for six to one year because many child care centers don't accept newborns. Too risky. You are left raising the babe in your house without being able to work, sleep-deprived, and your expenses going up due to diapers, doctor visits, clothes, cribs, and time where you can't work. Raising a human being that is healthy, educated, law-abiding, self-sustaining, employable, and socially adept? It is a huge investment of time, money, effort, and love. And the society in the USA especially is anti-Family in the worst way. People in the states in those evangelical churches talk sheer shit about the society being family-friendly. They are not. If they were they would be supporting single-parent households, investing in pre-k education programs, having excellently paid and trained and educated young children educators and professionals, and doing things differently than they are doing Donna.

Also, many women don't want to have kids. Period. They choose careers and professional life. I have talked to women who are terrified of pregnancy and giving birth. It is painful as hell and you risk your life every pregnancy you have. It is no laughing matter. In the Third World nations you can easily lose your life if you have no access to medical care.

All these anti-abortion advocates need to do a lot more than just lip service bullshit. They need to start spending money on families with children and subsidizing children's programs all over the world. They also need to encourage family planning. So if a couple doesn't want children or only want one child or two at the most? How do they make sure that happens? Injections? Condoms? IUD's? Birth control pills? Rythym method? What?

And once a woman almost dies and she says she doesn't want more children but her religion says no? How to deal with that?

Also, women's health issues should be ruled by other women. Not men. That is my thought on it.

Code Rood wrote:We have to make it attractive and do-able for people to start a big family, but the elite simply doesn't want to do it. In fact, they're against family. They promote things that are anti-family. They're deliberately working against us.

It's more the zeitgeist rather than the elite deliberately working in a certain direction. The elite are just responding to the common beliefs that their class and socialisation have taught them in post-modern Western societies. It is a grassroots trajectory that originated from the masses and intelligentsia. It was not produced by the elite, not at least from what I can see from public information.

Code Rood wrote:I mean, have you taken a look at millennials lately? Truly a sad case. Many millennials are barely able to support their own. Many are riddled in debt. Many of us have been indoctrinated with absolute nonsense. I'm afraid that the damage may be irreversable for a lot of millennials. The boomers and Gen-X'ers are also damaged generations, so no surprise that it's going further downhill. So many things have indeed gone terribly wrong in the 60's. Maybe an intelligent silent or boomer can tell us more about it.

We millenials don't know which way is up at this point.

Code Rood wrote:Oh no doubt. And we can't wait for much longer either. The millennials have to make this shift happen. And that is a scary thought considering what state most millennials are in.

All we can do is rediscover romanticism. In many ways the 60s were a dangerous period but we need to go back to flower power sentimentality of the early half of that decade. If we do this then we will have solved a lot of problems. Society is obsessed with money and power. That is the fundmanetal problem. People value money and power, superficial pursuit of happiness rather than looking higher and higher into the clouds. Money and career are not important. Only family and our ideals will free us. The open green fields under serene blue clouds will enrich us more than Beverly Hills ever could.

Politically the solution could not be communalism, either left or right. The only solution is to make a society based on the brotherhood of man where we work for the common good of both our homelands and the world. We must reject the far left and far right and pursue the path of radical centrism. All of these problems cannot be fixed by the Alt-Right or the re-emergence of the left but by nuanced politics of empathy which will allow us to fix all the problems we talk about. Migration, all of this, we can solve this issue while also achieving racial justice if we will walk to the beat of the correct drum. We need central planning and a combination of state capitalism and state socialism, corporatism, anti-imperialism and carefully planned migration policies to ensure that the interests of all functional groups in a society can be accomodated.

Fundamentally this idea would be based on Solidarism. Class warfare would be opposed. The unity and camraderie of the homeland, including all peoples within its borders, irrespective of race or creed would be the precondition for unity of continents and then the world, although while still maintaining sovereignty and national and ethnic distinctions.

The author/s of a 1967 English language NTS pamphlet wrote:Unlike Communism, Solidarism provides a twentieth-century basis for dealing with present day issues. It rejects a purely materialistic approach to social, economic and political problems. It postulates that man, rather than matter, is the chief problem today. It rejects the concept of class warfare and hatred, and seeks to replace this dubious principle with the idea of co-operation (solidarity), brotherhood, Christian tolerance and charity. Solidarism believes in the innate dignity of the individual and seeks to safeguard as inalienable rights his freedom of speech, conscience and political organization. Solidarists in no way claim that their ideas represent the final answer to all problems, but they believe that man who is master of the atom bomb must also become master of himself and his destiny.

The internal divisions within a society, whether these be racial or class based must be opposed. Liberal capitalism failed to do this, as did communism and of course fascism. We need careful central planning to ensure that the intricate details are managed properly so as to ensure the cohesion and accomodation of all interests within society.

There would not be any mass immigration issues or racism, we could reconcile both the rightward and leftward tendencies in our societies if we had proper government.

Donna wrote:I'd say anyone who wishes to reverse the very modernization of immigration (i.e. the Hart-Cellar shift) is qualitatively a white nationalist and a racist. Public discourse on immigration must begin with the rights and social well-being migrants and migrant communities (i.e. it should only be acceptable to restrict immigration in certain specific situations, such as a particular global pandemic or to prevent particular private firms from illegally exploiting migrant labour, such underpaying them or exposing them to unsafe working conditions). If someone wishes to turn immigration into a discourse on culture, they should at the very least be suspect of low key racism.

What about restricting immigration for the sake of internal house keeping? If mass immigration is causing social instability you could restrict it until you sort out the problems first.

Surely structural racism must be sorted out before migration can continue. Otherwise you are inviting migrants into a less than ideal situation knowingly enticing them to settle in a country with communal problems. And racism will not be stopped by immigration. People will continue to be racists even in plural societies, and I am speaking about the white racists in this instance.

North Korea is not a country which experiences much migration, neither is China and the Soviet Union as well as Warsaw Pact countries did not experience much immigration either. In the Soviet Union populations were not allowed to move freely. There were internal passports:

Wikipedia wrote:A propiska (Russian: пропи́ска, IPA: [prɐˈpʲiskə] (About this soundlisten), plural: propiski) was both a residency permit and a migration-recording tool, used in the Russian Empire before 1917 and in the Soviet Union from the 1930s. Literally, the word propiska means "inscription", alluding to the inscription in a state internal passport permitting a person to reside in a given place. For a state-owned or third-party-owned property, having a propiska meant the inclusion of a person in the rental contract associated with a dwelling. A propiska was documented in local police (Militsiya) registers and certified with a stamp in internal passports. Residing anywhere for longer than a few weeks without a permit was prohibited.

The USSR had both permanent (прописка по месту жительства or постоянная прописка) and temporary (временная прописка) propiskas. A third, intermediate type, the employment propiska (служебная прописка), permitted a person and his or her family to live in an apartment built by an economic entity (factory, ministry) as long as the person worked for the owner of the housing (similar to inclusion of house rent into a labour contract). In the transition period to a market economy in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, the permanent propiska in municipal apartments was one factor leading to the emergence of private-property rights during privatization (those who built housing at their own expense obtained a permanent propiska there by definition).

Not only was migration into the USSR not easy or on a mass scale but internal migration within the country was also controlled. We could hardly call the Soviet Union a fascist or racist state, especially considering its role in assisting liberation movements in the global south. It was of course the country that defeated Nazism once and for all.

Donald wrote:It has nothing to do with millennials being "self-absorbed". Increasingly people, especially increasingly politically conscious young women, are having legitimate ethical qualms about bringing human life into a world that is going off the rails and is effectively running on borrowed time.

The world has always been going off the rails and been running on borrowed time.

The years 1945 to 2015 were perhaps the most stable time the global north has experienced in the last 400 years. We are now just returning back to normality.

The solution is to keep our chin up and keep going. Not having children because it is getting difficult again is not a solution.

A propiska was documented in local police (Militsiya) registers and certified with a stamp in internal passports. Residing anywhere for longer than a few weeks without a permit was prohibited.

This discriminatory law had been enforced by denying Tatars a propiska and many Crimean Tatars lived without a propiska in the Soviet era. When an employer discovered an employee was a Tatar, the police pursued him and he was beaten brutally. Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union mainly targeted people of Tartar descent. Tatars were transferred en masse to Tatarstan by the Soviets just after the war, too. Molotov justified this decision saying "The fact is that during the war we received reports about mass treason. Battalions of Caucasians (Tatars) opposed us at the fronts and attacked us from the rear. It was a matter of life and death; there was no time to investigate the details. Of course innocents suffered. But I hold that given the circumstances, we acted correctly." Soviet media promoted negative stereotypes about Tatars or Tatarophobia (Татарофобия) to justify their deportation and marginalization, which is also reflected in how modern Russians view Caucasians and Asians in general.

Famous skaters like Kamila Valieva and Alina Zagitova are from the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia.

LET'S MAKE THE WORLD GREAT AGAIN TOGETHER!Давайте вместе снова сделаем мир великий!

Political Interest wrote:What about restricting immigration for the sake of internal house keeping? If mass immigration is causing social instability you could restrict it until you sort out the problems first.

First of all, what do you mean by mass immigration? Generally reactionaries use this phrase to distinguish immigration patterns before and after the Hart-Cellar shift, sometimes without realizing it.

Surely structural racism must be sorted out before migration can continue. Otherwise you are inviting migrants into a less than ideal situation knowingly enticing them to settle in a country with communal problems.

A great deal of POC immigrants are willing to tolerate racialization and marginalization in wealthy nations in order to escape body and soul-crushing poverty. Why do you think this is a 'gotcha'? Do you believe racism and xenophobia are justified if immigrants are willing to make this trade off?

And racism will not be stopped by immigration.

Who is claiming that it is?

People will continue to be racists even in plural societies, and I am speaking about the white racists in this instance.

And civil society and anti-fascist movements will continue to mobilize against them. I don't know why you think this is an argument.

Not only was migration into the USSR not easy or on a mass scale but internal migration within the country was also controlled. We could hardly call the Soviet Union a fascist or racist state, especially considering its role in assisting liberation movements in the global south. It was of course the country that defeated Nazism once and for all.

None of that means that white supremacism did not exist within USSR. Jim Crow-era America and arch-colonizers Britain and France also fought the Nazis. This seems like another pathetic gotcha.

The years 1945 to 2015 were perhaps the most stable time the global north has experienced in the last 400 years. We are now just returning back to normality.

Not really, we are now facing an existential crisis that we have not previously faced, or at least not on a planetary scale.

The solution is to keep our chin up and keep going. Not having children because it is getting difficult again is not a solution.

While it is obviously difficult to have children, that isn't the same thing as the notion that it's immoral to bring human life into a crisis situation.

Donna wrote:First of all, what do you mean by mass immigration? Generally reactionaries use this phrase to distinguish immigration patterns before and after the Hart-Cellar shift, sometimes without realizing it.

Why you keep referring to Hart-Cellar? Not everywhere is the USA or Canada.

European countries did not have race based immigration acts. They never had a National Origins Formula.

I am referring to immigration scale, not national origins, ethnicity or religion of migrants. It's a question of scale not of other factors.

Mass immigration is the level we see now where at least 100,000 people settle in a country each year.

Donna wrote:A great deal of POC immigrants are willing to tolerate racialization and marginalization in wealthy nations in order to escape body and soul-crushing poverty.

Surely Western countries should work to improve the living conditions of the global south rather than having Western capitalists lure them to the global north where they are exploited and discriminated against.

Donna wrote:Why do you think this is a 'gotcha'? Do you believe racism and xenophobia are justified if immigrants are willing to make this trade off?

No, never.

Donna wrote:Who is claiming that it is?

What solution do you propose to stop racism and white supremacism?

Donna wrote:And civil society and anti-fascist movements will continue to mobilize against them. I don't know why you think this is an argument.

Because it would create perpetual social instability and communalism, especially if the anti-fascist movements are violent and aggressive.

Donna wrote:None of that means that white supremacism did not exist within USSR.

Until the 1990s people in the USSR did not think in terms of whiteness. There was no white supremacism.

Donna wrote:Jim Crow-era America and arch-colonizers Britain and France also fought the Nazis. This seems like another pathetic gotcha.

The Soviets contributed far more in human loss, they lost 15, million according to conservative estimates.

You cannot compare what was at that time and arguably throughout the 20th century the best working example of Marxism in practice to a Jim Crow era state like the USA or colonial powers like the UK and France.

Donna wrote:Not really, we are now facing an existential crisis that we have not previously faced, or at least not on a planetary scale.

An existential crisis more bloody than WWII?

Donna wrote:While it is obviously difficult to have children, that isn't the same thing as the notion that it's immoral to bring human life into a crisis situation.

None of us choose the times or control the global situation. We cannot wait for a perfect world because there never will be one. Waiting to have children may result in never having them for some people.

Political Interest wrote:Mass immigration is the level we see now where at least 100,000 people settle in a country each year.

Why 100,000? I tried verifying that metric and definition and couldn't find anything.

Surely Western countries should work to improve the living conditions of the global south rather than having Western capitalists lure them to the global north where they are exploited and discriminated against.

Who is claiming that immigration is a solution to problems in the global south?

What solution do you propose to stop racism and white supremacism?

Solidarity and anti-fascism.

Because it would create perpetual social instability and communalism, especially if the anti-fascist movements are violent and aggressive.

What do you propose to de-platform fascists and prevent them from advancing their movement? It's pretty clear that anti-fascism is fairly proscriptive here and the violence associated with anti-fascism is largely petty and exiguous and possibly even justified.

Until the 1990s people in the USSR did not think in terms of whiteness. There was no white supremacism.

The Soviets contributed far more in human loss, they lost 15, million according to conservative estimates.

What is your point? That if enough people from a country die fighting literally Hitler, your nation will magically overcome systemic racism?

You cannot compare what was at that time and arguably throughout the 20th century the best working example of Marxism in practice to a Jim Crow era state like the USA or colonial powers like the UK and France.

All I am doing here is debunking the notion that being part of the class of '45 makes you forever immune from not-being-racist.

An existential crisis more bloody than WWII?

Yes.

None of us choose the times or control the global situation. We cannot wait for a perfect world because there never will be one. Waiting to have children may result in never having them for some people.

Anti-natalism is a personal ethical choice that people need to make on their own. External factors that might disincentive people from having children is a separate issue.

This is rougly the number of people settling permanently in the UK on an annual basis.

Long-term international migration continued to add to the UK population, as an estimated 226,000 more people moved to the UK with an intention to stay 12 months or more than left in the year ending March 2019 (net migration).

In the year ending March 2019, 612,000 people moved to the UK (immigration) and 385,000 people left the UK (emigration).

Long-term immigration, emigration and net migration have remained broadly stable since the end of 2016.

Since 2016, there has been a fall in immigration for work; over the same period, immigration for study has been gradually increasing.

Donna wrote:Who is claiming that immigration is a solution to problems in the global south?

I never claimed it. But economic imperatives should be removed as a factor for why people emigrate by instead improving the economies of the global south. Aid should be increased.

There is also the issue of countries in the global south losing their experts to the north.

Donna wrote:Solidarity and anti-fascism.

Meaning?

Donna wrote:What do you propose to de-platform fascists and prevent them from advancing their movement? It's pretty clear that anti-fascism is fairly proscriptive here and the violence associated with anti-fascism is largely petty and exiguous and possibly even justified.

In Western liberal countries fascists can easily rent venues to promote their ideas and speak freely in public. They can hold rallies and promote their opinions in the press and on the internet.

The solution is control of the press and to make it illegal for them to hold their conferences, publish their books or promote themselves through media.

Children should be given anti-racist education and camraderie should be promoted as widely as possible through propaganda.

Donna wrote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Soviet_Union

A lot of those deported ethnicities were also white. Baltics and Germans for example.

Many years ago on the Soviet Empire forum I used this to say that there was discrimination in the USSR. The communists told me it was not.

Of course this is not to excuse these deportations, but just to question whether they were motivated by white supremacism. They were presided over by an Asian leader, Joseph Stalin.

When Khruschev came to leadership and after the 1956 speech he allowed many of the deported nationalities to return to their homelands.

Donna wrote:What is your point? That if enough people from a country die fighting literally Hitler, your nation will magically overcome systemic racism?

The anti-racist credentials of the USSR were quite pronounced. In a society that had no colonial history (Russian Empire although imperial was not colonial) and where only until recent times there was no real concept of whiteness it is difficult to claim there was white supremacism in the Soviet system. This is not to say there was not discrimination.

Stalin was Georgian and a POC.

Donna wrote:All I am doing here is debunking the notion that being part of the class of '45 makes you forever immune from not-being-racist.

Of course it doesn't. But the level of white supremacism in the USSR was probably superficial at best for both historical and ideological reasons. It was probably little more than would have existed in the People's Republic of China.

Donna wrote:Yes.

I fear that the future will be terrifying.

Donna wrote:Anti-natalism is a personal ethical choice that people need to make on their own. External factors that might disincentive people from having children is a separate issue.

It is a personal choice. No one can force anyone to have children. However we will never have a perfect world. If you are waiting for the perfect time to have children you will be waiting for a long time.

I don't see what the problem is as long as they pay their taxes and obey the law.

As for the 'British jobs for British people' argument... If you believe your government, figures show that before the pandemic turned everything on its head the unemployment rate was at its lowest since 1974. And, if you are worried about what happens after, the BoE is sure the Covid-19 recession will be V-shaped with the UK on track for a rapid recovery.

So stop whinging.

There will be jobs for all in the best of all possible Brexity worlds.

"All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia" Orwell